Impressions of France: Money, Renoir,
Pisarro and Their Rivals
Fall 1995,The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
“Impressions of France”, a somewhat
unwieldy exhibition of French landscape painting from the mid to late 19th
century documents parallels and differences between mainstream landscapes
painted principally for purchase by the French State and those of the
Impressionists which although contemporaneous were not initially considered
worthy of acquisition by the French Government. The work of Cezanne, Pisarro,
Monet and Sisley on view represent a way of seeing that is now considered to be
the foundation of modernism; on the other hand in the Salon landscapes we
witness the winding down of a universally accepted style that had had its
origin in the Baroque and which in the hands of the French Salon painters
becomes decidedly decadent . This simultaneous winding down of one style and
the burgeoning growth of another raises questions of how historically styles
succeed one another. The notion of what is decadent and what authentic looms
large in this show and most importantly the role that individual vision and
imagination play in establishing a new style.
According to Michael Baxandall’s book
”Shadows and Enlightenment” scientists and artists of the 18th century were
interested in the nature of perception and in particular the way the retina
translates patterns of light and dark into form. According to Baxandall the
authenticity of an artist such as Chardin lies in great measure in his ability
to convey the notion that the observed is the invention of the seer. #1. The
paintings center of gravity is always within the observer. The acceptance of a
unique light source and the fluency and immediacy of the brush strokes
contribute as well to the sensation that we are inside the artist’s
consciousness. Although the narrative and the social implications are important,
the studied expression of the perceptual experience as visual event is primary.
In the case of the salon painters the center of gravity seems to lie outside
the viewer in the landscape and with the story the landscape would convey to
the socially dominant class that might purchase the painting. All socially
relevant detail is explicitly represented: The geographical location,
recognizable monuments such as Chartres Cathedral, the social class of the
people in the landscape (usually peasants). The brush strokes vary within each
painting depending on what they are conveying .The formulas and motifs are
repeated enough to be identified as such: over and over we are served up the
road narrowing in perspective and several individuals strolling along this road
which reaches its vanishing point midpoint in the horizon.
The overwhelming mood of the Salon
paintings is one of melancholy . The oversized canvasses with their large
expanses of sky, sea or field induce a feeling of disorientation . The preferred
time of day is dusk. The self that is manifest is not the strong self that
eventually dominates 20th century art from Picasso to deKooning and Serra. In
the salon painting man is clearly not the measure by which the expanse of space
is parceled out. These artists believe naively in the illusion that chiaroscuro
creates. Once that illusion is established, the references to social
narrative abandon both the facticity of the objects represented and the object
making ability of the eye. The artists space is neither universal nor personal
but one of shared social assumptions and prejudices, especially those
assumptions based on institutions such as the Church and the bourgeoisie which
represent the conservatism of the dominant social order. To convey the dominant
role of the former, Churches figure prominently in many of the paintings and to
reassure the bourgeoisie of its control over the working class comforting
images of peasants quietly accepting their burden of labor in the fields fill
numerous landscapes.
How were the Impressionists capable of
becoming the “forerunners of modernism” affecting ultimately a sea change in
art, which relegates their competitors of the academy to the dustbin of
history. Merleau-Ponty in an insightful essay on Cezanne, entitled “Cezanne’s
Doubt” provides a possible explanation in his description of the psyche of the
most important artist of the pre-modernist revolution. #2 In Merleau-Ponty’s
view Cezanne is clinically schizophrenic. Felicitous human interaction is
beyond him. Most of his personal relationships are fraught with suspicion. Over
the course of this life he appears according to the observations of townsfolk
to become more and more embittered and alienated. Although lacking in the
social skills of the world and according to his childhood friend Emile Zola
insensitive to the social and political issues of the late 19th century France,
he was exquisitely attuned to the shape that the impressions of the observed
world took within him. These are impressions not shared with his fellow
citizens. There are no labels on his paintings either figuratively or literally
like the name on the stern of a boat on Elodie La VIllette’s painting that
situates the landscape for the viewer in Dieppe. A church or anything
recognizable except primordial rocks, trees and sky, does not dominate
Cezanne’s landscape. The impressions are configured into an architecture where
each stroke is part of a whole. There is no sloppy variation of style from part
to part as we see in the Salon painters.
The thrust of Merleau-Ponty’s essay is
that Cezanne’s illness defined his attitude toward painting. Merleau-Ponty goes
to great lengths to distinguish this emotional background from Cezanne’s
project, which starting from the hand that nature dealt him builds out of it a
noble oeuvre. What I find helpful in this analysis is the notion that that
Cezanne’s illness made him incapable at both the personal and the societal
level of reading the social signs that bind us to society; so that at heart he
remained unsocialized and therefore eminently qualified to focus on the inner
experience of apprehending the landscape as landscape rather than the role is
plays in French Culture. Everything is turned inside out. The roads that
meander off into the horizon from the bottom of the painting in a large number
of the Salon landscapes are present in Cezanne’s paintings but he subverts the
expected reality so that the road ends up closer to the viewer at its vanishing
point than where it began. What serves as an entry point into the painting for
the salon artists actually functions as an obstacle to entering into Cezanne’s
painting.
Seeing the work of Cezanne side by side
with his once well-established contemporaries accentuates the common notion of
Cezanne as “farouche” and renders the Salon artist more insipid than they would
appear beyond the context of this show. Cezanne’s choice of what to paint
reflects the thought processes of someone who “just doesn’t get it”. In one
small landscape (most of the impressionist works are noticeably smaller than
those of their salon counterparts) he paints a landscape with branches
obscuring the road. One can almost imagine that he was dropped blindfolded
before the scene and asked to paint unflinchingly the scene before him when the
blindfold was removed. He would be forced to abandon all conventions and go
beyond the narrative constructs that lock us into daily life. Whereas La
Villette, Bavoux and the countless unknown artist of the late 19th century
continue to paint in the now fatigued manner of the of the once radical
concepts of chiaroscuro and perspective, Cezanne drops down from the retina
which is the locus of value perception to the striate cortex of the brain where
the values are analyzed according to verticality, horizontality and
diagonality. #3 Just as Caravaggio’s rigorous and powerful use of chiaroscuro
spread rapidly throughout Europe to define the styles of Velasquez, Rembrandt
and Vermeer, Cezanne’s understanding of the role of line direction and its
relations to seeing space becomes the raw material for cubism, minimalism and
various optically based art forms of the 20th century.
The implication of my interpretation of
Cezanne’s personality on a general notion of the evolution of the language of
painting is that stylistic change can be achieved not only by deconstructing
the current visual language but by going beyond it to the underpinnings of that
language which are not yet culturally appropriated. Those thinkers and artists
who promote modern paradigms of cultural revolution that aim to deconstruct
accepted ways of seeing at a cultural level in order to go beyond them would do
well to study Cezanne. Oblivious to the social signs and symbols, the accretion
of his inherited culture he could more fully discover the inner visual
structure of the eye/mind. The battle of transformation is not won only by
questioning the notions of the current visual order but by digging deeper into
the structure of the eye/mind itself. That the possibilities of the language of
chiaroscuro had run their course could only be understood by a few people who
were not easily seduced by its current incarnation as a vehicle for describing
the social order of the late 19th century. The creation of these artists was anew language, more vigorous and inclusive of varieties of the visual
experience, which grew out of how the landscape was internally apprehended, not
what is was supposed to represent externally to the class of collectors and
cognoscenti of the time.
#1 Baxandall, Michael.” Shadows and
Enlightenment”, (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
#2Merleau-Ponty,Maurice “Cezanne’s
Doubt” in “Sense and Non-Sense”, Translated by Hubert L. Derives and Patricia
Allen Derives, 6th edition (Evanston Illinois: Northwestern U. Press, 1991)
pages 9-25
#3Hoffman,Howard S, “Vision and the Art
of Drawing”, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989) pages 48-67.
